Minecraft 1.0.1 Pre-Release Available, Weekly Pre-Releases Scheduled

While many of us were at home stuffing our faces with turkey and watching my beloved Dallas Cowboys beat the Dolphins, Notch and the rest of the Minecraft development team were hard at work releasing a new update.

On Thursday, November 24th, the minecraft_server.jar was updated to 1.0.1, which according to developer Jens Bergensten fixed "the login key problem and null pointer exception" when logging into servers.

This was a server-only update, with Minecraft 1.0.0 remaining as the current client version.

According to Jens, Mojang is "working towards automated snapshots, and will try to get one 'prerelease' out every week, regardless if it's stable or not."

These "snapshots", or pre-releases, "will be named 11w47 (year and week) + a, b, c et (in case we do more than one), in one word such as '11w47a'."

Until automated updates are functional, these pre-release builds are patched similar to before. You must manually copy the test .jar over your existing one, and aim to playtest various fixes, additions, etc. to future official releases.

Similar to how Minecraft 1.9 had several pre-releases, "these will build up to official releases once they feel stable and add useful features."

The new Minecraft update 11w47a can be found here, and Jens noted that it is practically identical to version 1.0.1.

"Barely anything has changed since 1.0... I'm getting into the mindset that snapshots are releases regularly regardless of progress."

As everyone knows, Mojan is currently expanding Minecraft for the Xbox 360, and is also working on a brand new title, "Scrolls". Many fans have been wondering if Minecraft will receive the same attention from developers as it had in the past. Jens assured fans that he will still be working full-time on Minecraft, while creator Markus 'Notch' Persson will oversee and work on newer projects.